Sunday started off with attempting to get out of bed. Yes it only took the extremely direct self motivating word of MOVE repeated at a rate of 10 times per minute for a bit before my toes finally responded followed eventually by the rest of myself (remember combination of early church plus hiking plus dancing makes mental cognition response time a bit slow). You know how people often wonder at how incredible the human body is? Especially the fact that we have approximately 19 muscles in each foot and another roughly 13 per leg? Well let me tell you that my wonder and awe level hit an all time low as I felt every one of those usually silent muscles make their presence known with every mini-step. Grandma syndrome hit with full vengeance and I was just grateful to make it the 5 feet from my bed to the hot shower in less than 10 minutes.
In case that wasn't enough I also had the privilege of speaking in sacrament meeting. Thankfully I was the last speaker and so by that point my body and I had already worked out a happy compromise that if it would support me for a 15 minute talk I would give it a 2 hour nap. Success and the nap felt so good!
That night the stake had organized a fireside for the ysa which sounded really fun so we went. It was at a chapel in the stake that we had not been to before. Funny, when we walked into the building the first thing we saw was a cultural hall full of posters and signs saying things like "match making" and "start here" on them. Rule number one of the NZ program- NO DATING began flashing through our minds as we looked at one another. What kind of fireside is this one of us asked but before there was an answer we were already be ushered into the chapel... too late to escape.
It was a good thing we stayed because it ended up being one of the most incredible firesides I have been to in a long time and no, not because I met Mr. Perfect. After the opening song and prayer they asked us to line up and head into the cultural hall. As we walked in they handed us a roll of tickets and told us that we could visit any of the booths available until they called time. The booths had all sorts of activities from listening to messages from Beyonce to playing games to passing off articles of faith and scripture mastery. For some of the booths you had to pay tickets and for others you could win tickets. There were YSA running around telling you what you should spend your tickets on or if you should just keep the amount that you had. After about 45 minutes they called time and we had to line up to get back into the chapel. We had to turn in our tickets (they wrote the number we had on our hand) and we also had to hand over any candy or other prizes that we had acquired from the booths. Next we were ushered into 1 of 3 locations in the chapel based on the number of tickets you had left over.
Yup, you guessed it. The fireside theme was eternity is now (that's actually the ysa theme for the year) and to help us understand the concept the leaders had put on an activity that resulted in a kingdom of glory based on the amount of tickets we had acquired through our "life." I'm sorry to say I wasn't quite celestial kingdom worthy (sorry Mom!) but good thing this was only an object lesson :). The second half of the fireside had 3 speakers- a couple and a member of the stake presidency. It was amazing as they talked about our potential in various ways. The man talked about the record of the 4 minute mile and how doctors said that it was physically impossible to do but that they were proved wrong and now people break that record quite often. It definitely got me thinking about how much I let others limit my potential instead of trusting in Heavenly Father and moving forward. Afterwards I made some new friends and even met a returned missionary who served with Tannen in England. Small world.
When we got back we had a movie night with Camila and finished the Work and the Glory series. I never realized how blessed I am to have visited so many of the church sites they mention in those movies. The best part of today was also the fact that Monday was Auckland day and therefore we had no school!
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